The Legacy of ‘All Deliberate Speed’

How should the nation commemorate the 50th anniversary of the U.S.
Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of
Education of Topeka? We could celebrate this historic decision for
outlawing apartheid in public education and establishing a precedent
for ending racial segregation in other areas of American society. Or,
perhaps more realistically, we could reflect upon the court’s
vagueness about enforcing this decision—its offering the odd term
"all deliberate speed" in place of a real timetable for school
desegregation. With this phrasing, we can see that imprecision as the
first of many evasions that even liberal whites made when it came to
translating Brown into educational policy.

The legacy of this history of avoidance and delay has left our
public schools so segregated (though on a de facto rather than de jure
basis) that there are good grounds for questioning whether there is
much to celebrate on Brown’s 50th. New York City’s
public schools serve as an excellent example. At first glance, they
appear to be among the most diverse in the world. Over 100 different
languages and cultures are represented among the 1.1 million students,
and over a third of those students are either foreign-born or the
children of newly arrived immigrants.

But a closer look reveals that the ghost of Jim Crow lingers even
amidst this multicultural mosaic. More than 73 percent of the
city’s schools are virtually segregated. Approximately 900
schools have student populations that are 80 percent to 100 percent
African- American, Latino, or both. The schools are segregated by
income as well as race. In the vast majority of these schools, more
than 85 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-priced
lunches. Although over 40 percent of New Yorkers are white, only 15.3
percent of the students enrolled in the city’s public schools are
U.S.-born whites.

Much of America shares with New York this pattern of profound race
and class isolation. Even the sites of some of the most famous
victories for school desegregation, such as Little Rock, Ark.’s
Central High School, have, because of white flight, re-segregated. In
the 1990s, the proportion of black students attending all-minority
schools rose from 33 percent to 37 percent, and in the South the
proportion of black students enrolled in white-majority schools
plummeted from 44 percent to 33 percent. Disturbingly, Latinos, who now
make up the fastest-growing ethnic group in the nation, are now more
likely to be segregated than any other group.

Unlike 50 years ago, when there was a growing sense that racial
integration was a moral goal worth pursuing, today that optimism has
vanished, and segregation in our schools and elsewhere is accepted as
an unavoidable feature of life in America.

The president’s No Child Left Behind law contains no plan to
support racial integration or to further equity among poor and affluent
schools. Even Democrats and other liberal critics of this law have said
nothing about its failure to deal with the persistence and expansion of
de facto segregation in America’s schools. Thus, one way to truly
honor Brown may be to challenge the left and right sides of the
American educational debate to stop running away from the issue of
school segregation.

A second way to commemorate Brown would be to honor those few
school districts that are still trying to make school desegregation
work, such as the 21 districts in the Minority Student Achievement
Network. These districts have defied national trends and remain
racially and socioeconomically integrated. Though challenged by a
variety of equity issues and a persistent achievement gap, such
districts serve as an example of what might have been if we had had the
leadership and resolve to realize the goals of Brown. Though far
from perfect, such districts show us that one of the most important
benefits of integration is the presence of middle-class parents who
utilize their political clout to advocate for resources that benefit
all students, and students who are better prepared to handle the
challenges of living in a diverse society because of the education they
received.

We can also honor Brown by revisiting the issue of
integration in communities of color. Many black and Latino communities
gave up long ago on school integration because of white resistance to
busing. In many cases, desegregation also resulted in the closure of
schools in black and brown communities and the loss of African-American
teachers. As a result of these unintended consequences of Brown,
many communities of color are increasingly focusing on how to make our
racially separate schools more equal. That focus has yielded a small
number of successful, selective public schools that cater primarily to
black and Latino students. Schools such as Fredrick Douglass Academy in
Harlem and the Young Women’s Leadership School in Manhattan
demonstrate that it is possible to create educational institutions that
produce high levels of achievement for students of color in racially
segregated settings, when adequate resources are provided.

The success of such schools also suggests that, for the time being,
the best hope for many minority children may be to accept racial
segregation and do what we can to create more high-quality segregated
schools. While this may be the most pragmatic thing to do, we must also
recognize how our sights have been lowered as we return to the
unfulfilled "separate but equal" promise of Plessy v.
Ferguson, the fatally flawed, segregationist U.S. Supreme Court
decision that Brown overturned.

Throughout the country, the more common experience for students is
to attend schools that are separate and unequal—schools that are
well-equipped and cater to the children of the affluent, and schools
that barely function and serve the poor, white and nonwhite. Throughout
America, a majority of poor children attend schools where learning has
been reduced to preparation for a standardized test, where failure and
dropping out are accepted as the norm, and where overcrowding and
disorder are common. Those who believe that integration remains a goal
worth pursuing must recognize that no law can force middle-class whites
to enroll their children in schools they seek to avoid, either because
they are too black or simply too bad, for the sake of integration.

So perhaps the best way to honor Brown is to use it to recast
the current debate over school reform. Let’s stop seeing reform
as an end in itself and start asking how improved schools in all
communities can be used to attract multiracial student enrollments to
those schools. And let’s start demanding that
Brown’s vision of integrated schools be addressed by
politicians of both major parties. Unless we do so, our children,
sitting in racially segregated classrooms, would be more than justified
in thinking us hypocrites, pretending to celebrate a school integration
decision that our nation has spent a half-century evading.

Pedro A. Noguera, an urban sociologist, and Robert Cohen, a historian, are professors at New York University's Steinhardt school of education, in New York City.

Vol. 23, Issue 37, Page 39

Published in Print: May 19, 2004, as The Legacy of ‘All Deliberate Speed’

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